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Sermon: Sunday 14th December, 2014

14/12/2014

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At this time of year, the Lectionary gives us two weeks in a row about John the Baptist. Is that not a bit much, you may be thinking, and certainly I have thought that too in the past and taken evasive action. But not this year. I am intrigued. I am intrigued as to why we read about him two weeks in a row, and I am intrigued by the man himself, John the Baptist.

So I thought it might be good to look at the similarities and differences between the picture of John presented in Mark’s Gospel – last week’s reading – and in John’s Gospel – this week’s reading. But let’s get one thing clear from the outset. John the Baptist is not John the writer of the Gospel. You knew that, but still it can be a bit confusing. John the Gospel writer does, I think, identify with the Baptist a bit, but we’ll come to that.

One similarity between Mark and John’s account of the Baptist strikes one immediately. And that is his humility. He has a phrase, almost a catch-phrase, which occurs in both accounts. Speaking of Jesus, he says he is not worthy to untie the thongs of his sandals. John clearly believed himself to be vastly less important than Jesus. The fact is, though, that John is a very important figure. This merely serves to point up how incomparably important Jesus is.

The importance of John comes through more clearly in Mark’s Gospel. There we hear how he attracted hundreds of people who came out from the surrounding cities and towns and countryside to hear him preach. He was a charismatic man, a man with a compelling demeanour, a message to which people responded and a ritual to which people chose to submit. To receive his baptism was a sign that his words had struck a deep chord; to receive his baptism was a profound sign of an intention to change one’s life and to seek to participate in the coming, promised Kingdom.

Mark portrays a man with an important message of his own, a man who gathered around him followers committed to preaching his message. John’s account is rather different. And, in a way, we need to hear it in the context in which John places it, surrounded by words which we have not heard this morning, but which many of us will know well. “In the beginning was the word . . .”

That’s how John begins his Gospel, painting a picture on a cosmic scale. This, he tells us, this which I am about to unfold to you, is about one who has existed since before all time. The Logos, the word of God, was the agency though which God created the heavens and the earth. But now, this is a story of how that aspect of God, the Word, was transformed for the transformation of the world, by becoming incarnate in the human form of Jesus of Nazareth.

But John needs a narrative bridge to link the cosmic to the earthly. And that bridge is John. When first he mentions him, he tells us only this – that he was sent from God, that his name was John, and that his job was to testify to the incarnation, to the light coming into the world, that everyone may believe. A vital role, to be sure, but a role of complete self-effacement.

A little later on, John returns to the story of his namesake. But the important thing was not who he was but who he wasn’t. John the Evangelist does not describe the preaching, the listening crowds or the ritual baptism in the Jordan that we learn about from Mark. To his mind, these things are of lesser importance, referred to only obliquely, and not the subject of the narrative.

What the Evangelist tells us about John is this: the authorities sent people to question him, from which we may surmise that he was causing a bit of a stir. When they asked him who he was, he didn’t tell them that he was John the Baptist, or that he was calling people to repentance and baptising them as a sign of their changed lives. He said, “I am not the Messiah.”

The questioners questioned him further. Are you Elijah, or another prophet? “No,” he replied. They were trying to understand him through the prism of their scriptures, but he wasn’t fitting their ideas. “Who are you, then?” they demanded. And John plays a little game with them.

He describes who he was in terms used by the prophet Isaiah – ‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord.”’ Only that's not what Isaiah said. He said, "In the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord," using the wilderness as a metaphor, meaning that we are to prepare for God to sweep through the chaos of our disordered, ungodly lives.

Either way, though, it is meaningful. John cries out his message in the literal wilderness and speaks into the wilderness of our lives. The message is from the wilderness to the wilderness and it is this – God is on the way. God is coming to us.

The people sent by the Pharisees had one last question. "If," they said to John, "you are not the Messiah, or Elijah, or the prophet, why are you baptising?” It is a question of authority. ‘By whose authority are you administering this sign?’ they are asking. John’s answer is as oblique as his earlier ones. He doesn’t tell them, but rather he does what he believed he was there to do. He said, in effect, stop looking at me. I’m of little interest, of little consequence. Start to look for the one you have not yet seen, the one I know is among you but you have not recognised, for he is the one who is really significant; he is the one who is truly important.

Always pointing to Christ. That was John the Baptist – always pointing to Christ. That too is the role of John the Gospel writer – always pointing to Christ.

In the Christmas carol, Once in Royal David’s city, there is a line referring to Jesus, “For he is our childhood’s pattern.” This morning, I would like to suggest that there are aspects of John the Baptist's life which we should adopt as our life's pattern. And from what I have said this morning, I would like to mention three things.

First, there was John’s daring to be different. Too often, in the church, we seek refuge in conventionality. We worry more about preserving what we’ve already got than about doing new things.  Many church people spend inordinate amounts of time and energy trying to keep other church people in line. We tend to think that we always have to get permission to think or do something different. John sought no one’s permission. He derived his authority to baptise from nothing other than his own conviction of his calling from God. To adopt such an approach to authority may be very challenging for us, and especially for those who are heavily invested in ideas of their own authority, but it could also be very liberating and fruitful.

Second, there is the compelling nature of John’s ministry as Mark describes it. In the good news of Jesus Christ, we have a compelling message for the world, that there is a way to peace and reconciliation, that there is a meaning and a purpose to life, that there is ultimate love and acceptance. Thinking about John should challenge us to be bold in our delivery of that message, and nothing will deliver it more clearly than living lives which demonstrate that it is true.

And third, we learn from John's Gospel of the Baptist’s total self-effacement. As his concern was only to point to Christ, so should our lives point to Christ, the author and finisher of our faith. We do not preach the Christian message in order that others may hear us preaching. We do not live the Christian life in order that others may see us doing so. We preach that people may hear God, and we live that others may see Christ.

Amen.

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Sermon: Sunday 7th December, 2014

9/12/2014

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We’ve heard that old familiar cry again this last week. “These measures are necessary because of the dreadful economic situation bequeathed to us by the last government.” Words like these come easily and frequently to the lips of politicians. And before you think I’m being party political, the next government, if it is formed by a different party or parties, will be saying the same about the current one, as the last one about the one before it. Politicians rarely, if ever, give credit to those who have gone before. In their rhetoric, if not their minds, what was before was all disaster, while they are the saviours the country needs.

How different is Jesus. Mark begins his gospel with these words: The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. But he doesn’t begin it, as Matthew and Luke do, with stories of the Saviour’s birth, but by reaching away back into the Jewish Scriptures, and by writing about a man went before, whose duty was to prepare.

But even in the first line, the title of his book, if you like, there is a sense of the direction in which he is about to go, and a sense of the situation in which Mark was writing. It is about 70 A.D. There is a war on. Radical Jews have revolted against Rome and Jerusalem is under siege. Everyone is afraid as the Roman military machine cracks down.

One sect refuses to take sides. They are the people who follow a Galilean called Jesus. Mark is one of them and, in the midst of all this turmoil, he is collecting stories and writing them down, partly as an encouragement to his fellow believers, partly as an insurance policy, to ensure that the memory survives, even if the believers all perish.

There is something bold about the title. In the midst of disaster, Mark says – here is good news. In the midst of turmoil, as society is being upended, he speaks of a Messiah, the Christ, drawing on Jewish apocalyptic traditions about God breaking into the established order of the world. In the midst of a brutal Roman crackdown, he appropriates a title which the emperors had given themselves – Son of God – and applies it to a Galilean carpenter, teacher, some say miracle worker, who had died a criminal’s death. In his first line, he issues that range of challenges to the established powers, even as they were locked in mortal combat with each other. The task he sets himself is to make sense of the present trouble.

To Mark, the key to understanding, and transcending, the present trouble is Jesus. But he realises that Jesus cannot be understood in isolation. Indeed, he makes clear that Jesus did not simply suddenly appear out of nowhere. The way had been prepared for him. He built on, he fulfilled what had gone before, not just John the Baptist, but the ancient prophets too. In order to explain Jesus, Mark looks back into the Scriptures of Israel. They are the roots of our Christian faith.

There he finds words spoken by Isaiah. He doesn’t claim that Isaiah was predicting John the Baptist but he sees an analogy between Isaiah’s words – In the wilderness, prepare a way for the Lord – and what John did and said. Isaiah was looking for God to restore Israel from Babylonian exile. In the first century, Israel was not in exile but it was under occupation. In John’s words, Mark hears an echo of the comfort Isaiah preached.

But what was this comfort, offered by John? A strange kind, to be sure. There’s not much by way of reassurance. No sense that the comforted are in the right, no sense that their oppressors are doomed. The comfort comes in the form of the word, “Repent”.

Curiously, it was a message which found an audience. People came out from the towns and cities to hear it, to consider it, to act upon it. It was a message which struck a chord with those who looked to God to deliver them from their present troubles. It was a message that those who look to God must first examine themselves to see if they are fit to stand before God, if they are prepared for the deliverance he can accomplish.

So the Good News can, at first, sound like bad news. The call to repentance and confession mean two things – they mean facing the truth about ourselves and they mean changing the direction of our lives. And many of us, most of us, perhaps all of us, don’t want to do that. We are aware that things aren’t perfect, that we aren’t as good as we might be, but what we are will do, we reason. But that’s not the message with which Mark begins his account of Jesus’ life. This, he says, this which I am about to unfold to you, is Good News, because it is news of God making a sweeping change, a sweeping change in his engagement with humanity, a sweeping change which demands sweeping changes in society and in everyone who hears and understands.

This was good news for the people who flocked out from the towns and cities to hear John preach by the Jordan and be baptised by him. It was good news for the people in Mark’s community, fearful in the midst of brutal war and oppression, and it is good news for us. All of us, if we lift our eyes from our own wee comfort zones, see that we live in perplexing times, times of uncertainty, times in which it is very apparent that there is much suffering and that not everyone is a person of goodwill. But the good news is that God is breaking into this world, that God has done so decisively in Jesus Christ and, through repentance, calls us to join with Christ in the building of the Kingdom.

Advent is the time for looking forward, and we do that, as Mark did, in part, by rooting our looking forward in the ancient stories of our faith. They provide the context for our hope. They provide the assurance that our hope is not in vain. John the Baptist reminds us that Advent, and the whole Christian life, is a time of preparation and, as God called him to prepare for the coming of the Messiah, so God calls us to prepare for his return. He calls us to prepare, not just by attending to our own attitudes, but by attending to the needs of those around us and by witnessing to the fact that God is already at work and by seeking to bring others into the fellowship of those who work with Christ. And Advent reminds us that the Christian story begins with longing, longing for a better world, a world in all its ways more closely in harmony with heaven; and it provides us with the assurance that such a world is not only possible, but will be realised, because the Christ whom the herald proclaimed on Jordan’s bank, the Christ whom Mark remembered and worshipped as Jerusalem was being destroyed, the Christ to whom Christian people have turned in every time of trouble, will come again to reign in glory.

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    Posts here are by Sandy Horsburgh, Minister of St Nicholas Buccleuch Parish Church.

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Dalkeith: St Nicholas Buccleuch Parish Church (Church of Scotland) 119 High Street, Dalkeith, EH21 1AX
Scottish Charity Number SC014158